Thelma Schoonmaker

[arnzilla]

NY Times interview - December 9, 2013

Scenes Not Safe for Work, Even for the Film Editor
By MELENA RYZIK

By now most of the Oscar bloggerati have seen “The Wolf of Wall Street,” which means one thing: it is poised to “devour” the Oscar race completely. Or its chances are, at best, “a mixed bag.”

Here’s the one thing that is certain: Martin Scorsese’s epic retelling of the story of Jordan Belfort, the infamous financier who built an ill-gotten empire on penny stocks, clocks in at two hours and 59 minutes — down from his original cut of nearly four hours. That’s two movies’ worth of Leonardo DiCaprio, who plays Mr. Belfort, and Jonah Hill, as his right-hand man, behaving badly — very, very badly, nearly NC-17 badly — often in unscripted ways.

The Bagger caught up with Thelma Schoonmaker, Mr. Scorsese’s longtime editor, at a party recently, and she explained why the movie is Mr. Scorsese’s lengthiest, and why it took so long to finish.

“The improvisations were so brilliant, it muscled up to four hours,” she said. “I love improvisation. I mean, it’s hard to edit, because things don’t necessarily fall together — you have to find ways to give it a dramatic scope, shape. But it’s so much fun. I was roaring, just at the dailies. My assistants came in and said, ‘Are you all right?’”

“There’s still some wonderful improvisations that I wish we had in, but we were able to shave it down,” she continued. “We didn’t have to cut off our legs. In a lot of movies, like ‘After Hours,’ we cut out my favorite scene, Marty’s favorite scene — we had to, to make the film work. But here we didn’t lose too much. We shaved it down, that’s what took so long.”

Though Mr. Scorsese’s recent films — like “Hugo” and “The Aviator” — were faithful to their scripts, it’s not the first time he’s experimented with spur-of-the-moment dialogue. “‘Raging Bull,’ “Goodfellas,” “Casino,” “King of Comedy,” they were all heavily improvised,” said Ms. Schoonmaker, 73, who edited all of them.

What was new for her was the near-pornographic raciness: “This is a lot of sex and a lot of drugs,” she said. “It was a bit of a shock at first. Sometimes people would come in the editing room and there’d be some outrageous image on the screen and I’d say, ‘Wait a minute, let me move that off.’”

The film was recut in part to avoid an NC-17 rating. “Marty wanted to make it very obvious where the censorship is,” Ms. Schoonmaker said, “so when you watch it you’ll see that things feel a little short at certain times,” where Motion Picture Association of America guidelines necessitated a snip to get an R rating.

“But it all works well,” she said, then added of the “Wolf of Wall Street” characters, “These guys were out of their minds.”

[will]

thanks, arnzilla.
Now, both Scorsese and Schoonmaker have talked about a couple of improvisations/lines they wish they had left in and it doesn't sound like they were part of the censorship cuts.

[nas78]

I`m glad Thelma uses the word censorship because that`s what it is.
The fact that an artist accepts that censorship is another discussion.

[arnzilla]

Interview with Studio System News - December 13, 2013

If there was a hall of fame for editors, Thelma Schoonmaker would surely be in it. A longtime collaborator with the legendary Martin Scorsese, she has cut every one of his narrative features since 1980’s Raging Bull, for which she won the first of her three Oscars for Best Editing (the others were for The Aviator and The Departed). This month’s The Wolf of Wall Street marks their 17th collaboration together, and has Schoonmaker on the short list to get nomination number eight.

SSN: After working with Martin Scorsese for so long, how would you define your role in the cutting room?

Schoonmaker: I bring a certain sensibility and a fresh eye, obviously. He feels that sometimes I see emotional elements in the footage that I can bring out. Over the years we have established a relationship based on trust that began early on, when I first met him and helped him fix a film that had been ruined in the negative. We have such an old relationship; we’ve been working together close to 50 years! (laughs) It’s like an old marriage in a way. It’s a very long and trusting relationship.

SSN: If you look at the number of movies you’ve made together, it’s fair to say that you have literally spent years together, sitting side-by-side in the cutting room. What would it be like to be a fly on the wall for those sessions?

Schoonmaker: (laughs) Watching people edit could be really boring at times, because we try this and we try that, but I’ll do a first cut while he’s shooting, and then when he comes in, there’s a constant give and take between us. In between, we discuss things in the news, or a book he’s read or movies we’ve seen, and then, out of our line of view, we always have Turner Classic Movies on a television. The first thing he does when he comes in is turn that on, because he wants to be able to look over occasionally and watch these great films that have formed him and inspired him over the years. Some times he’ll stop and say, ‘Wait! Wait! Hold on! There’s this great shot coming up right here!,’ and we’ll stop and watch for a moment. That’s a wonderful rich sort of layer that goes on all the time here.

SSN: That is fantastic.

Schoonmaker: It’s like being in the best film school in the world. It’s not only that he knows so much about it, it’s that he can articulate in words, better than anyone I’ve ever heard, what it is that makes a film great, why this edit or that shot is so important. It’s stunning to listen to. It’s constantly refreshing the way your brain works while you’re editing.

SSN: There was a bit of controversy about Paramount having to move the release date of Wolf of Wall Street. What was the hold up?

Schoonmaker: It’s because there was a lot of improvisation on the film, and improvisation is very hard to cut. Things just don’t match. If you have one actor going on a wonderful improvisation that is not in the script, and then the other actors follow, you have to find a way to make that work. And the improvisations on this film were so rich, and the actors were so good, once Marty saw that, he gave them a lot of freedom to run with their ideas. So the film got bigger and bigger, and we had to bring it back down again very carefully. Believe me, it’s worth it, because the quality of these improvisations and the work of these actors is what makes this film special. It was worth the time we took.

SSN: Do the external pressures of a situation like this seep into the editing room?

Schoonmaker: You definitely feel it, but one of the great things about Marty is he’s always stood his ground to get the film that he wants. He’s very skillful at that, he knows how to handle people at the studio and is very respectful, but also insures that his art is not messed with. Fortunately, we’ve been able to succeed at keeping any of his films from being ruined. He’s a warrior who will protect his film to the death. I know stories about the struggles he had before. I know Taxi Driver was really tough.

SSN: Have there been any other times in the 30-plus years you’ve worked with him that you’ve had struggles with the studio?

Schoonmaker: Usually every film is. (laughs) Every film is, because sometimes they’re unusual and that makes people nervous and they’re not sure if it’ll sell. I don’t think anyone ever thinks it’s going to be easy, that meeting of commerce and art, but you better learn how to deal with it. You have to survive somehow, and have your art survive. That’s one of the good things about working with a guy who’s such a fighter. It’s never easy, believe me.

[will]

From the Wall Street Journal:

In an early scene in "The Wolf of Wall Street," a fresh-faced stockbroker at L.F. Rothschild (Leonardo DiCaprio) is having lunch at a five-star restaurant with his new boss (Matthew McConaughey), who proceeds to openly snort cocaine, drink several martinis and hum a primal tune while beating his chest and uttering sporadic macaw-like sounds.

The singing, like many of the more outrageous moments in the film, was entirely improvised.

Director Martin Scorsese "saw that he had this unbelievably fertile group of actors, and he thought, 'Well, we haven't done improvisation in a while, but we're known for it,'" says Thelma Schoonmaker, who has edited all of his feature films since 1980s "Raging Bull," for which she won the first of three Oscars.

Many of Mr. Scorsese's most iconic scenes were unscripted. One famous example: the tense confrontation in "Goodfellas" (1990) between Ray Liotta and Joe Pesci when Mr. Pesci's character, mobster Tommy DeVito, says "I'm funny how? How am I funny?" But "The Wolf of Wall Street," due in theaters Dec. 25, contains more improvisation than most of the director's recent films.

As a result, the film's running time had ballooned to four hours and 10 minutes when it was screened for its producers over the summer. The first cut of Mr. McConaughey's madcap lunch scene was six minutes, 11 seconds long. "It was painful to think of a single frame coming out," says producer Emma Tillinger Koskoff. (The scene now runs more than five minutes.)

The delicate task of shaving down the film to a just-barely-acceptable two-hour-and-59-minute runtime—without cutting a single raucous scene, disrupting the flow of the movie or straying too far from the plot—fell to Ms. Schoonmaker. "You keep honing down to the skeleton, and it's hard," she says. "Giving up things is hard. But I have always had to do it." While the actors have been shown some of the footage that wound up on the cutting-room floor, it is unlikely that audiences will ever see it; Mr. Scorsese doesn't believe in director's cuts.

Starting in the fall, she and Mr. Scorsese began working seven days a week to finish the film in time for a revised Dec. 25 release date, so the picture would still be eligible for awards-season consideration. (The movie had missed its original Nov. 15 date, resulting in some last-minute schedule-scrambling from Paramount Pictures.)

"People loved the long cut," says Ms. Schoonmaker. "But you just can't distribute a film of that length—it's not feasible." Despite the fact that the studio was targeting a 2.5-hour runtime, she says, Paramount executives agreed that the film was finished when it Mr. Scorsese screened the nearly three-hour version.

"Everybody was anxious to have the movie ready this year," says Ms. Tillinger Koskoff. "Ultimately [Paramount] deferred to Marty when he presented his final cut." Paramount said executives weren't available to comment.

Ms. Schoonmaker, 73, met Mr. Scorsese 50 years ago while she was taking a summer-editing course at NYU. She helped him edit his first feature film, 1967's "Who's That Knocking at My Door." They stayed in touch, working together on "Woodstock," a 1970 documentary, but didn't start collaborating regularly until "Raging Bull." Soon thereafter, Mr. Scorsese introduced Ms. Schoonmaker to one of his filmmaking heroes, the late director Michael Powell ("The Red Shoes," with longtime co-director Emeric Pressburger), who became her husband. He died in 1990.

Sitting in her New York office, the walls adorned with movie posters and a list cataloging all the 248 scenes in "Wolf," Ms. Schoonmaker recalled how she and Mr. Scorsese often found themselves "roaring with laughter" while combing through the unedited footage. At one point, she says her assistants came into the editing room to ask if everything was all right, because she was cackling so much while watching a 20-minute take showing the Stratton Oakmont executive team being deposed by the Securities and Exchange Commission. The scene was eventually shaved to five minutes, a process she described as excruciating.

Whether or not audiences would find the scenes as funny as she and Mr. Scorsese did was an open question. "When you are sitting in the editing room, you don't feel [the reaction] from the audience," says Ms. Schoonmaker. "Especially with a comedy—and I guess this is a black comedy—the first time we screened it and heard the laughter, it was great."

Normally, the duo will screen their films about 12 times before locking picture. But owing to the time crunch, they were only able to host six "Wolf" screenings, attended by friends and friends-of-friends, to get their feedback. Ms. Schoonmaker had suspected that one scene, in which Mr. DiCaprio's character is teaching his ragtag band of brokers how to sell to rich people, went on for too long. The test audiences noted that in their comment cards, too, confirming her hunch. So, she kept slicing away bits of dialogue, "until people didn't tell us that anymore."


online.wsj.com/news/articles/SB10001424052702304477704579256590613553018

[arnzilla]

Interview with Kris Tapley

Thelma Schoonmaker talks cutting 'Wolf of Wall Street' improv and learning from Martin Scorsese

We almost got 'Kill Bill'-style paired volumes out of the opus
By Kristopher Tapley Friday, Dec 20, 2013 8:44 PM

BEVERLY HILLS, Calif. — Film editor Thelma Schoonmaker has been with Martin Scorsese since the beginning. Their collaboration, which extends over 19 feature films, a handful of shorts and even a Michael Jackson music video, has made for some of the richest, purest, most alive American cinema in history, and "The Wolf of Wall Street," opening next week, is just another notch on that belt.

I recently sat down with Schoonmaker to discuss all of that and more, and I don't mind saying, I couldn't help but gush. Anyone with a passion for cinema, I imagine, will fight the urge to bow at the feet of a woman like this, who has been such a consistent force behind some of the most indelible film imagery of our time.

Schoonmaker has been nominated for six Oscars for her collaborations with Scorsese, having won for "Raging Bull," "The Aviator" and "The Departed." Meeting him changed her life, as meeting her surely changed his. And that certainly came across in our hour-long conversation, which you can read through below. It's another long one, so settle in, or bookmark it and enjoy it over the holiday.

(NOTE: There are mild "Wolf of Wall Street" SPOILERS indicated here and there in this interview.)

*********

HitFix: First of all, it's just such an honor to sit down with you. I have to gush a bit, I'm sorry. Yours is simply one of the storied collaborations in all of cinema.

Thelma Schoonmaker: Well, thank you. Marty was quoted the other day as saying we've been working together for half a century, which is pretty staggering! I said, "My God." Actually there were 10 years when I couldn't work with him because I wasn't in the union out here. When he came out here we didn't have to be in the union back there [in New York]. And then finally on "Raging Bull" I got in. But yeah, I mean who knew when I first met him that this would happen? It changed my life. I would never, probably, have become a filmmaker. It was just a summer course and I had wanted to become a diplomat. The state department told me I was too liberal. I passed all the exams and they said I was too liberal, I would be very unhappy there. So I took a job with this horrible guy who was butchering the films of Fellini, Truffaut for late-night television slots. And it was so awful, that job, that I saw an ad for a six-week course and I thought, "Well, I can just barely afford that." And there was Marty. I could've just taken that six-week course and it would have been a lark and I would have gone on to something else, but because I met him my whole life changed.

Did he just awaken something in you with his passion?

Oh yeah. There were a lot of very talented people there that year. But Marty's student films were — right away I saw that he was someone exceptional at it. And so we all banded together, started making documentaries for PBS and 'The Merv Griffin Show' and things like that, and we're helping Marty finish his first feature film, which was 'Who's That Knocking.' And he taught me how to edit. I knew nothing about editing — nothing. He taught me everything I know. Because of that and his wonderful high standards, my values are his values, so we worked really wonderfully together in a collaboration. We don't fight.

I suppose it can be good to fight sometimes, no? You butt heads and get at something creative in the process?

It's not that we don't disagree, but we don't fight. A lot of the director/editor relationships are really acrimonious. That's not good for a film.

What did you learn early on from Marty that has been kind of a cornerstone for you in your work? What's something that stays with you every time you're in the editing suite?

Well, you know, going for the truth. Always to avoid sensationalism or anything like that for its own effect, but to really try and get down to the truth. We had learned that also on documentaries, which we were making because it was the great explosion of cinema vérité. It was a great period in American filmmaking. I would think that his philosophy is not to use gimmicks and not to tell the audience what you think, but to make them feel it. And you have to engage with his movies. If you don't, it's hopeless. He taught me that. The editing style is really, again, about simplicity and not gimmicks, you know? So it's a little hard for us right now with the modern style of blender editing, where everything is two frames long. He keeps saying, 'Where is the shot?' Whatever happened to the great shot like Kubrick used to do? And you could watch it for six minutes and never get bored because it was so beautifully framed. It had such beautiful music. And what was going on inside was so great. Now it's just, the image doesn't mean anything. It's just…

The music video after-effect on the industry, I suppose.

Commercials, everything. And they seem to be getting so short now that I wonder if they're going to come to the end of the road. I don't think they can make each cut any shorter! I wonder if there will be a big backlash and everything will go back to being slow again.

It's interesting because there are actually a number of movies this year that speak to that, with photography and editing of great patience. "12 Years a Slave" and "Gravity" let shots play out, for instance.

Good. Probably "Nebraska," too, right? And the Coen brothers'?

That's an amazing movie, "Inside Llewyn Davis." And interesting editorially because of the live singing and the lack of a click track. So they're cutting…

…multiple takes. Yeah, that's hard. That's like cutting improvisation in our movie. It is hard but it's tremendous fun and really worth it. But it is hard. I was brought up on it, you know? I mean, "Raging Bull," two of the greatest improvisers in the world, De Niro and Pesci. So I always loved it. And the documentary training was helpful because you're given a slew of footage of a documentary and you have to find the story. And so that was the case with some of the "Raging Bull" improvisations, that I had to find a dramatic structure in it. And similarly here [in "The Wolf of Wall Street"], I mean these guys were just – once Marty saw he had this formidable body of people, we could improvise, he just decided to be very brave and let them go, you know, within a framework. And they all say that he was laughing a lot of times because there was so much great stuff happening. The sound man said his laughter is on the track, but I never had a problem with it, and of course, the actors, when they hear Marty laugh, that's great. They were so wonderful the way they worked together as a team and kicked each other off. Jonah Hill is just brilliant at it.

[MILD "WOLF OF WALL STREET" SPOILERS]

Well, the sequence that everyone will be talking about, obviously — the quaaludes sequence — is just great. Everyone erupted into applause at my screening after that scene.

I was very surprised to hear that. That rarely happens. Yeah, I heard that. I think it was Jonah told me that people applauded after that. It must've been the same – was he there?

He was sitting right in front of me, actually.

Oh, he was? Was that the first time he saw it?

That's what I was told, yeah. But it's such an extended sequence. It's like a little movie in the movie.

That's right, that's right. And Marty was quite adamant about the long shot of him crawling towards the car. He took no close-ups, no frontal angles. He said, "No, I want to hold on that part," because that's the humor, his body language and opening it and his leg getting stuck up. And the great thing I love is when he finally does pull himself in and his wife is telling him that Donnie's on the phone with Switzerland and he's trying to talk to her. And then finally he pulls his two legs in. It's all just silent film comedy, really.

[END SPOILERS]

Does it feel like it's been this long working with Marty?

No, not at all.

Does it feel like yesterday for you?

It does seem like yesterday, because he's so – he's never boring. He never repeats himself. Every film is a new challenge and he's such a fascinating person to be around. I mean, very up and down, you know? He can be very moody, usually when someone's messing with his art. But he's so fascinating. And then it's like being in the greatest film school in the world because we have on the – we look this way when we're editing and on the right we have TCM on silent. So we're watching, constantly, classic movies. And every once in a while he'll turn over and say, "Wait a minute, look, there's a great shot coming up. This director did this great thing here." So, you know, it's like being in the greatest film school in the world as well.

Maybe there's some osmosis or something going on there!

Yeah. It's inspiration. So every once in a while we look over. It's so intense and fascinating. It's an extraordinary thing to be around him. Both of us don't feel our age, also, which is rather staggering when you think of it! We've had a very rich life, my God. Between him and then my husband, who he introduced me to — Michael Powell, the great British film director — I've had the best job in the world and the best husband in the world. So, I mean, what more can you ask for?

This one appeared to present a lot of challenges as it came down the stretch. The financiers were eager to release it in 2013 and you had such a large cut to bring down. How did you navigate that as the deadline approached?

Well, it was hard. When we got the four-hour — you know, what happened was five lines in the script mushroomed into a five-minute, brilliantly improvised scene, so the whole thing just blew up. I was very worried and I said to Marty, "There's no way we can get an hour of this out of this movie," but we did by just shaving it down slowly. Instead of cutting out scenes, which would have been really devastating, we just shaved things down and did three or four screenings and kept going and kept going and finally we got there. And I would never have believed we would have done it. So it was fortunate because it would've been disastrous if we hadn't. I mean you can't distribute a four-hour movie.

I can't imagine anyone wanted to do that, either.

But people loved the four-hour cut.

I guess maybe you could have done something like "Kill Bill." Volume one and volume two.

Well, we thought about it. We did. But the film doesn't work split in half. It has to have a certain arc. We did think about it, believe me, because people loved the four-hour version.

I heard second-hand from people who had seen that version early on that they had no idea what you could cut.

That was a thing, too. People kept saying, "Oh, well, yeah it is too long but I couldn't tell you what to cut." So that kept happening over and over again, but fortunately, as I say — it would've been horrible if we had it cut out whole scenes.

Were you pleased with where it ended up or did you feel like there was more work that could have been done?

Oh yeah. There are improvs I would still like to have in it, but no, no. It's got to sustain itself. And I don't think it would have been good to be longer than this.

What about shorter?

Yeah, maybe if we had a little more time maybe we could have gotten a little more out. I don't know. But I have kept the long cuts for the actors because they did so many wonderful things. I want them to see them.

It's interesting because, at least for me personally, I walked out of the movie feeling like it was something that wanted to be longer.

Really?

Yeah, like it could have been a mini-series if it wanted to be. Getting it down to what you got it to was a tough chore, but it just felt like it had more to say. Not that it felt like it was withholding anything, it's just a robust portrait, you know?

It was actually a little more complicated and was making more statements, actually, in the longer version. But I don't know. It's impossible. There is some film — I think there is some film that Lars Von Trier has done that's a four-hour movie.

Yes, that's "Nymphomaniac." It was actually five-and-a-half hours originally! And it looks to be quite racy. Speaking of which, I had heard that Marty was keen on releasing "Wolf" with an NC-17 rating, kind of like "Midnight Cowboy."

You know, I think what happened is because he's been working on HBO, where you can get away with a lot more — he's an executive producer of "Boardwalk Empire" so he's been seeing a tremendous amount of stuff, and he got used to it. And I think he sort of almost forgot. So when I said to him, "What about censorship," he said, "Oh, no, we don't have to worry about that." But I must say they [the MPAA] were very good with us. They like Marty's films and they really like this one. So they worked with us. And if we agreed to do certain things then they let us have some things. Once he realized he had to do it he was angry about it but he did it.

I was still frankly surprised this version made an "R."

I know. I know.

[MILD "WOLF OF WALL STREET" SPOILERS]

There's one scene in particular toward the end that, how should I put this delicately, displays a lot of "motion."

The last one, you mean. Yeah. And it's very hard to watch [that scene]. And it's supposed to be. Marty wanted it to be painful. It's very painful to watch that. Yeah, that was the other thing they gave us was that scene. They were not happy about it.

[END SPOILERS]

So how has this experience been in the grander scheme of working with Marty for so long? Does it ever get to a point where it's just another one? Of course each brings with it its own experience but at this volume…

Never. I mean this film couldn't be any more different from "Hugo" if you tried! And it couldn't be more different from our next film. So the great thing about this, it never feels like same old, like I'm in a rut, never — because they're always so different. I mean "Gangs of New York" is so different from "The Aviator," which was so different from "The Departed" or "Age of Innocence" or "Kundun." So every one is a great new challenge. This one was great because of the improvisation and I love cutting improvisation and I hadn't done it in a while. So it was really fun. I was just roaring with laughter in the editing room. I mean my assistants would come in and look to see what was going on because it's not normal with dailies to be laughing so much. Usually we have to create the humor, but because it was improv and long stretches of improv it was – I couldn't stop laughing, which was a new experience.

When was the last time you remember cutting improv on this level?

Well, we did a little bit — had to do a little bit — in "The Departed" with Jack Nicholson and Leo. But the biggest one before that would have been "Casino." And then, of course, "Goodfellas," "After Hours" and "Raging Bull." "King of Comedy," also, a tremendous amount.

Yeah I think maybe it was Leo who said something about watching a making-of video about "The King of Comedy" specifically because of the improvisation.

Yeah, a tremendous amount of improv. But it's funny that we haven't been doing it. And suddenly here it was again. Boy, I mean, just tons of it pouring in. They were having such a great time, the actors. I don't know if they'll ever have such a wonderful project again. They were just having one hell of a good time making it. I couldn't understand how they could not laugh during the scenes because they're sitting there talking about dwarfs, throwing dwarfs around, and one of them can be a bowling ball. I said to Leo, "How did you do it without cracking up?"

Do you ever make it down to the set at all? This certainly would have been a fun one to be on.

I love to go to watch Marty work but I don't have time, usually. Also, it influences my eye. I don't want to be told what I'm going to see the next day. I really like to see it evolve on the screen. And I don't read the script except once and then I put it away, because I want to see it evolve. And Marty doesn't put a lot of what is in his films in the script. A lot of it goes in as he's making it. I would love to go but – particularly this one, we were in New York and it was the first movie we made in New York in a long time, but they were so far away in Westchester that it's just too long a commute. I can't afford the time. I need to be cutting! But there have been other films I've been on the set more for.

You mentioned the period of time you couldn't work with Marty due to the union situation. I think most people just assume you cut all of his movies.

Right, it was 'Boxcar Bertha,' 'Mean Streets,' I didn't cut his wonderful documentary 'Italianamerican,' have you seen that?

Yes, it's wonderful.

"New York, "New York" and there's one other I'm missing. "Alice," did I say "Alice?" Usually he was working with a team of three editors in those days, one of them being Marcia Lucas, George Lucas' wife. And then when he hit it with "Star Wars" she wanted to go and work on his movie so she left and that's when he called me.

Oh, and "Taxi Driver."

Right, "Taxi" I didn't do. It was, again, the team of editors. One of them was Tom Rolf, a very well-known editor. He was not happy working on it but he did some great work. He did the 'are you talking to me?' and the great scene up in Harlem. But he was unhappy. I don't think he really liked Marty's movies. Marty suffered a lot in his early days in Hollywood with rejection, you know. A tremendous amount. People don't realize that. He really has had a very, very rough time here. For example, I mean "Taxi" was horrendous. It was really bad when it got to the distribution stage. And he just didn't feel welcome here. And that's why he moved back to New York. I think it was his redemption coming back to New York. And that's when he made "Raging Bull," so it was a real important shift. I mean his films before that are all very, very good. But he just felt he wasn't welcome here. It's sad. It's interesting.

How does he feel about it now?

You know, it's just part of the function of our lives, that's all. He would never want to live here. He doesn't feel comfortable here at all. But boy, recently he's been telling me some stories of his early days. It was rough. It's interesting that you have to have such a strong drive in you that you have something to say that you can survive that. I don't know if I could have survived the stories he's told me. But he had this burning desire to make films and it sustained him. Then when he sort of almost lost it, "Raging Bull" brought him back. And De Niro was a very big part of that. Marty was in the hospital and De Niro just kept saying to him, "Come on, don't you want to see what we're going to be like when we get old? We've got a lot to do ahead of us." And he helped pull Marty around. Marty didn't want to make it. Bob just gave him five minutes to make up his mind finally. He just said, "Either you make it or I'm going to go get somebody else," and then Marty said, "Okay." And look what happened.

[will]

Interview at Film.com:

I recently had the opportunity to chat with Ms. Schoonmaker on the phone about the rushed post-production of “The Wolf of Wall Street”, the instability of digital storage, and to which previous Scorsese /Schoonmaker film their latest collaboration owes the most (hint: it’s not “Goodfellas”).

I love the film very much, I’ve seen it twice now.

Oh, great!

And I’d see it a third time in a heartbeat.

Oh my God that’s wonderful. I hear that from so many people, and then there are those who think it’s too long, but I hear from so many people that they could watch it over and over again.

Well, I certainly don’t think it’s too long, and I could have watched several hours more despite how reprehensible these characters are, but of course balance and moderation are integral in making a film like this work. And that’s the first thing I wanted to ask you about, about balance. You do a remarkable job of balancing the fact that this story is told from Jordan’s perspective, but at the same time the audience is also being seduced by him. And those sound as if they’d be oppositional ideas, but you make them work so well in tandem…

Ha, well, it’s in the writing and the directing and the acting, of course. But I think they made a decision early on to immerse you in that world, the way that Marty immersed you in the world of the mafia in “Goodfellas”, and to show you why it’s so attractive and why these people get sucked in and make terrible decisions. That was the way they wanted to go with the movie, and they didn’t feel like if they were going to do that to show the other side, the people whose lives they were ruining, so they made the deliberate decision to leave them out. In fact, you barely hear the people on the other end of the phone, because that would be another movie.

This is about understanding how this excess arose, and so it was definitely a commitment by them to make you sense that Jordan Belfort… I’ve never met the man but I’ve seen videos of him, and he just doesn’t let you off the phone. That was his big thing, he’s so powerful in the way he presents things that he sort of hooks you in and they definitely wanted Leo to give that same feeling. And Leo had been working on this project for seven years trying to get it funded, and he said that he worked on those speeches for a very, very long time. But it’s incredible, isn’t it, how it’s almost like Hitler. [Laughs] Actually, it’s much better than Hitler, Hitler must have seemed a bit ludicrous, but it’s like any mesmerizing dictator who… you stop thinking. That was the trick with selling to people, to get them to stop thinking and to start reacting emotionally, and to manipulate that emotion, and that’s what Leo was doing. Especially in that one speech where he says I want you to ram this… the way he builds up to that is really incredible.

And you know, he hit it on that one take. That’s what happens in great speeches like that. For example, Daniel Day-Lewis in that great speech from “Gangs of New York” there’s the scene where he’s sitting with the American flag wrapped around his shoulders and Leo wakes up to see him there and he gives this incredible speech, and that was take one. And it was IT. Take two was not as good, take one was it. Leo hit his speech on take four or five and you just knew. The whole room just held their breath.

---SPOILER---
Going back to the people on the other end of the phone, I noticed that Mr. Scorsese was one of the voices on the other end of the phone…

[Laughs] Yes!

And I’m curious if that was a decision that you made at the beginning, or if his vocal cameo came about later in the production?

No, no, I just felt that there was a point in that wonderful scene where you see how good Leo is as a salesman in that little investors’ center, and I felt that there was just a little too long of a pause while he was waiting for the guy on the phone to speak. Of course there was no one on the other end of the phone, I don’t think, but I said to Marty if we could hear that voice, and he was reluctant because we cut that part out of the movie originally. And he said alright I’ll do it temporarily and then we decided to keep it! [Laughs]

[Laughs] It’s a great touch.

It’s very low, you can barely hear it. But people do recognize that very distinctive voice! It’s like the eyebrows. [Laughs]

He and I have the same eyebrows, so I know what’s that like all too well.

Oh good.

---END SPOILER---

I remember reading about your initial disappointment in shooting “The Wolf of Wall Street” digitally, and I know that a compromise was eventually made where only the low-light scenes were shot on the Alexa –

– And the digital effects… stuff that needed digital effects. You know, like the boat in the storm or the helicopter, things like that, the visual effects people can do so much more if it’s digital. But we really intended to shoot digitally, but what happened was that Rodrigo Prieto our cameraman was giving us tests of various things, and he would shoot with several different digital cameras and then he would shoot with film, and every time Marty and I would say “Oh, we like that one”, and it was always film. So Rodrigo said let’s shoot it on film, because we probably won’t be able to do it anymore. You know, it’s so sad… The labs are all closing down and it’s just so sad.

Did using two different formats complicate the edit at all?

No, because everything is given to me digitally. The film is immediately transferred to digital because it’s just so much easier to edit with it, so it made no difference to me it at all. Doing 3D on “Hugo” was a big learning curve for me, but fun! But not here, ever since “Casino”, our first digital movie, we were shooting still on film there but editing digitally, so I’ve gotten very used to it.


Well on that note, something I was thinking was almost too ridiculous to ask you but I’m going to go ahead and ask you anyway… do you think that the parallels between Jordan Belfort’s story and the reckless progression of film technology –

[Laughs]

– that has lead us to the point where Sony couldn’t even give you a 35mm print of “The Age of Innocence”, do you think there’s any connection there?

Well… it’s an interesting idea. I do think that everyone is rushing headlong into this complicated technology now to the point where interfacing with somebody else, or some other system, become so complicated, sometimes you just wish you could go to your flat-bed editing machine and just flick a switch and it would come on. But now my assistants spend a great deal of time, they understand this computer stuff better than I do, I edit on a computer but I don’t understand half of what we go through, editing the film and screening it… you have no idea how complicated all these have become, and I worry because it makes us so vulnerable, doesn’t it? All you need is for all the cell towers to down in some disaster and –

– Poof, all the movies are gone.

It’s very true, there is something scary about this rush. And you know digital isn’t stable. It has to be migrated every five years or else it just vanishes.

Yeah, it’s not even as good an archival medium as film.

That’s right. Film, if properly cared for, will last almost 100 years, but digital will not. You’re right, it’s a little scary.

Going back to this particular film, I had the pleasure of talking to [screenwriter] Terence Winter the other day, and he told me that “The Wolf of Wall Street” was consciously designed as a companion piece to “Goodfellas”. And I’m curious if “Goodfellas” was an active reference in the editing room, and if it would sound crazy if I said that the film actually reminded me more of “After Hours” than anything else?

I think you’re right! I never thought of it as a companion piece to “Goodfellas”, and I don’t think that Mr. Scorsese did either. I think he wanted it to have the rush quality of “Goodfellas” at points, but I don’t think of it as “Goodfellas” at all, I think that’s a whole different thing. These people are doing much more damage than the guys from “Goodfellas” were doing, that was somewhat limited to a few murders here and there, but the damage these people did was enormous, and you’re quite right that it’s very similar to “After Hours”, which by the way was also heavily improvised, and a tremendous amount of fun to cut. It was pretty wild, and this was pretty wild. So I agree with you.

---SPOILER---
Speaking of the spirit of the editing, one thing I wanted to ask you about was the green bolt of lightning from William Dieterle’s “Portrait of Jennie” that makes an appearance just before the party scene in the Hamptons –

[Laughs] Yes! “Portrait of Jennie”! You know Marty, when I told him we were doing stock footage research for the lightning, he said “Oh no no I want to use that one from ‘Portrait of Jennie!’ because it’s so dramatic and that’s what we ended up doing. He knows his lightning bolts, every one that’s in every movie.

---END SPOILER---

The inclusion of that really typifies the energy that binds the whole film together.

Yes, I’m glad, it’s supposed to be the feeling of a cocaine hit, and I hope it works out that way.

The way that Mr. Scorsese uses individual songs feels like a score because the individual pieces are so woven into the tapestry of the film.

It is scored. It’s scored by him with pre-recorded music. And I’m glad you say that, because you have no idea how brilliant he is about putting music… he makes it work so well that you don’t think it, but who would put “Mrs. Robinson” by the Lemonheads instead of the original during a scene where the F.B.I. is raiding an office on Wall Street? Who would ever think of that? Or who would put Purcell, 16th century or 17th century composer, against Donnie bombed out of his head on Quaaludes? Marty is a genius for putting music to film, and that’s why you’re saying it feels scored, because he weaves the music into the film in such an expert way. And sometimes it’s totally unexpected, but it works. For example, the piece at the end “Cast Your Fates to the Wind” is such a familiar piece to all of us, and he thought about it for three weeks and then he finally said to me “This is what I want to use.” And it’s a cleansing feeling, Jordan’s going on to a new life, but it’s a brilliant. And who would think of that? Nobody would think of that but him.

I only have time for one last question, and I’m afraid it’s one that many people have probably asked already, but… I’m not interested in what was cut from the film, I like to accept it as it is, but I am interested in how you and Mr. Scorsese solicited feedback for your various cuts in such a tight editing window.

One of our big tools is screening. We screen usually 12 times, which is much more than most filmmakers do, and we recut in between each one, because we really need to feel how the audience is reacting to the movie. Marty has never forgotten how to react as an audience, it’s one of the great things about siting with him in dailies, because he’s very tough on himself. He’ll say “Burn that, I never want to see that again.” He’s very tough on himself. He looks at as an audience, and we were of course roaring with laughter as we watched the dailies on this one. But the screenings are very important, and we start with a group of people we know and whose reactions we know how to analyze because we’ve done it with them before. And we start with 12, and then we up to 50, and then we up it to 100, and there are friends of friends of friends, hopefully people we don’t know. But we need them to be trustworthy, not to blog about it.

[Laughs] Right.

That is an incredibly important moment for us, because just putting one new person into the room makes us see the movie in a whole different way. You start seeing it through their eyes, and you learn that this is too slow, you’re missing a laugh there, we need to restructure here, etc… so it’s very important.

So it sounds like you had time for all the usual processes with this film?

No, we only had time for six screenings instead of 12! But we knew we had to get it out, so we only had six even though I wish we would have had 12.

www.film.com/movies/thelma-schoonmaker-editor-interview-the-wolf-of-wall-street

[arnzilla]

Speaking of the spirit of the editing, one thing I wanted to ask you about was the green bolt of lightning from William Dieterle’s “Portrait of Jennie” that makes an appearance just before the party scene in the Hamptons –

[Laughs] Yes! “Portrait of Jennie”! You know Marty, when I told him we were doing stock footage research for the lightning, he said “Oh no no I want to use that one from ‘Portrait of Jennie!’ because it’s so dramatic and that’s what we ended up doing. He knows his lightning bolts, every one that’s in every movie.

That shot was amazing, like a bolt of adrenalin. The “Portrait of Jennie” thing is like the zoom in on Liotta's face from the cocaine, but turned up to 11.

Going back to the people on the other end of the phone, I noticed that Mr. Scorsese was one of the voices on the other end of the phone…

I didn't notice that.

[will]

I think I only noticed it because I was expecting it. He was the first caller for Belfort on the Investment Center and you can tell it's him especially towards the end when he's upping the number of shares and he's laughing

[arnzilla]

Wolf of Wall Street Editor Thelma Schoonmaker Says Leonardo DiCaprio "Will Do Anything for Marty"
By Katey Rich

January 7 2014

Behind the violent, emotional, and unpredictable men who have populated most of Martin Scorsese's films, there has always been one cheerful, whip-smart woman. Thelma Schoonmaker began working with Scorsese on his first feature, 1967's Who's That Knocking at My Door, and since Raging Bull has edited every one of his films, winning three Academy Awards along the way. For The Wolf of Wall Street, the hotly debated film released on Christmas, Schoonmaker was helping Scorsese trim the original four-hour cut of the film, along with navigating tricky waters of depicting the terrible behavior of stock trader Jordan Belfort (Leonardo DiCaprio) without celebrating it.

Schoonmaker says she always knew they were going to have to delay the film from its original November release date—it was just a matter of getting the studio to listen and give her and her collaborator the time to do their work. In our conversation, Schoonmaker discussed what it's been like to watch DiCaprio grow as an actor since he first worked with Scorsese on Gangs of New York ("It's wild, what he's doing"), why she loves editing scenes with improv, and how the cuts they made to Wolf of Wall Street are nothing compared to the pain of cutting her favorite scene from 1985's After Hours.

Did this movie feel like it was going to be so big and so funny when you started?
No, I don't think any of us except the writer and Marty and our casting director realized it was going to be so funny. That was a bit of a shock, a delightful shock. Everybody thought oh, this is going to be about Wall Street, it's going to be serious. But what happened instead is there's this wonderful humor that comes out of the callous behavior of these guys. I was sitting here just roaring with laughter as I watched the dailies, and that's unusual for me.

How many days of dailies did it take before you realized you could laugh at all this?
Oh, I realized right away, because one of the first things I saw was that incredible thing of Matthew McConaughey at lunch, training Leonardo DiCaprio to be a broker in the worst possible way. I could not believe the funniness of how it was written and then the beautiful way it was acted. And Leo's reactions were so fantastic. It was just a delightful thing to fall into my hands!

That scene at lunch goes on for a really long time, and it's really different from the quick rhythm of the earlier scenes. How did you settle on that rhythm? The movie kind of pauses to have Matthew McConaughey give that speech.
Marty wanted the film to have sort of a ferocious quality to it. He planned all these beautiful sequences, for example, from the very opening of them throwing the dwarves and then him riding in his Ferrari and the way he introduces the mansion and his wife and the yacht, and everything. It's all very fast. Then when we found out that these actors were going to be so incredible in these scenes, then the film comes to a screeching halt for a moment to savor that beautiful scene and then picks up again, then slow down again for another scenes. So it was kind of an unconventional structure. But it's something new, and that was fun to discover.

Does that ever make you nervous, to embrace an unconventional structure? Do you ever worry about losing the audience?
I think that's certainly always a concern, but i must say these scenes play like crazy! Whenever I see them with an audience they're laughing right through it and they want more.

Is there more improv in this than anything else you guys have made?
Yeah, more of the scenes had improv in them, but the basic script was beautifully written by Terry Winter. They humor is not just improv. What would happen is they would embellish and embroider the wonderful scene that Terry had written. But our early films—Raging Bull, King of Comedy, After House, Casino, Goodfellas—were heavily improvised. It was so much fun to get back to that again. I love it, because it's like a puzzle you're given and you sort of have to fit it together to make it a full scene.

Having gone through 20 years since the last improv-heavy film, are you smarter about doing it now?
Once you learn how to do that, I don't think you ever lose it. It very quickly came back to me, believe me. The problem is then that you have this rich material and you have to shorten it. It was hard sometimes to take out some of this wonderful stuff, but we had to to get the film to flow right. That's part of my job. But it was hard.

I'm curious about the conversation between you and Scorsese when you realized the release date had to be pushed.
I mean, it just became clear that the way it had ballooned up in the film—it had gotten much bigger than was intended because of the improvisation. That we were going to need more time. I knew that very early on. It just took a long time to convince people!

Was there any particular character or thread that especially ballooned?
The whole thing of Jordan teaching his brokers how to sell to rich people was actually a much, much longer scene. We just found that people wanted it to be shorter. That was very clear from our early screenings. We just kept cutting it down and cutting it down until we got to where we are now. That took a long time.

People actually enjoyed the four-hour version. It was clear that it would be better for the whole film to cut it down, so that the film has a flow instead of stopping and starting. It's part of your job always as an editor, you always have to drop stuff. At least I didn't have to drop my favorite scene and Marty's favorite scene, like we had to do on After Hours. It was literally my favorite scene and Marty's favorite scene It was like cutting off a leg, as an editor.

There are scenes where you guys lingering on the suffering and destruction in all this—like the woman having her head shaved—but not a lot of them.
The writer, Marty and Leo wanted to immerse you in the craziness of this world and make you understands why these people were attracted to it and made these terrible decisions to be part of it. And just like Marty did in Goodfellas, where he sort of immerses you in the world of the Mafia, and you see why people think it's a great idea to join it, and then you see the end of result of it and it's terrible, they don't take care of their women, then they go to jail. And all the terrible things have happened. I think he wanted to do that. It was better to get people to feel what these guys were doing, and that's why they committed themselves to that.

The scene you've probably gotten asked the most about is the Lemmons scene, the wild drug trip. There's so much interesting stuff going on with the camera, it stays still and them moves within the perspective. How did you not only assemble the scene but maintain the tone so that it stays funny?
Well, it's interesting. I didn't expcet it to be as funny as it is. But Marty knew, right from the beginning, it was going to be funny, and that it could sustain. When he starts to crawl toward the car, I said to Marty, "Didn't you do any coverage, to cut away to a close-up here or an insert of his hands or anything?" and he said, "Oh no no, the humor is in his body language as he drags himself in a wide shot toward that car." And Marty knew it was going to work. And I was a little nervous about it. The first time we screened it people were just roaring. He really knows, and he's very daring. He was just killing himself, Leo. That's very painful what he was doing. He never gives up. He will do anything for Marty. He will just keep going until he drops. He hurt his neck and all kinds of things, but he just kept going. But Marty knew the humor of the body language in that wide shot was the thing.

Leonardo DiCaprio has given a lot of great performances, but this feels like a new level he couldn't have done without working for you guys so many times. Do you feel like you've watched him grow?
Yeah, I think of course he just completely trusts Marty. A lot of the actors have been saying on these panels that they feel safe in Marty's hands, because he understands that things can be humiliating. He's acted himself, and he's been very nervous when he's done it. So he knows that actors need to have the feeling of security. Once they get that feeling, then they're willing to just blossom and do anything. Leo has been incredibly good about just trusting Marty. He's so brave in this movie, isn't he? It's wild, what he's doing. I think that he understands that Marty will do right by him, once we get into the editing room. That trust is built over the years more and more and more. I love that he can really make fun of himself. And there's nothing like a handsome actor doing that.

[will]

Video interview with David Poland:

[arnzilla]

IAR EXCLUSIVE INTERVIEW: Editor Thelma Schoonmaker Talks 'The Wolf of Wall Street' Blu-ray/DVD, Working with Martin Scorsese and Her Legendary Career

[peanut80]

Arnz

Tks for Thelma interview from dvd